Nita Odedra, Blue Rhine Industries

Sixteen:Nine - All Digital Signage, Some Snark

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

Dubai, Qatar and more recently Saudi Arabia have developed a reputation in digital signage for bankrolling projects that seem mainly focused on sizzle and scale. But there's a lot more going on in the region than work that's just about Wow Factor.

It's a busy, high opportunity part of the world for companies delivering big visual display projects, but also one that presents a lot of challenges in how things work - everything from regulations and timelines to cultural differences.

I've got to know a Dubai-based company called Blue Rhine Industries through its strategy director, Nita Odedra, who I first met at an ISE conference. I'd already been impressed by how the integrator actually produces useful marketing - tight, explanatory videos that do the job of explaining what was done and why. It seems sensible, but is remarkably rare in this sector. I see a LOT of it, so I know.

Nita and I had a great chat about the company's roots as a traditional sign company, and how and why it expanded into digital. We spend a lot of time talking about what's happening in the region, what customers want, and how business is done.

If your own company is thinking the Gulf region presents a lot of opportunity for expansion, that is indeed true. But like a lot of things, it looks easier that it appears. Local knowledge and experience are invaluable.

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TRANSCRIPT

Thank you for joining me. For those people who don't know Blue Rhine Industries, can you give me a rundown of what the company does?

Nita Odedra: Yeah. So we're a digital signage system integrator headquartered in Dubai, in the UAE, and we are working across the entire GCC on various projects. That includes additional screens, software, and interactive solutions, across a range of industries. That's us in a nutshell.

What are the roots of the company?

Nita Odedra: So we formed in 2006 by a gentleman called John V. Joseph, who still runs the company now, and he started the company as a static signage fabricator.

So very humble beginnings where we were fabricators for static signs and shop signs. So it could be a Starbucks sign or a Cartier sign. Then inside the retail stores, it would be the category signage, light boxes, and menu boards in F&B, and that's how we started the business.

And you went to digital, was it because there was an opportunity or it was one of those things where you looked at it and realized, okay, we have to go this way?

Nita Odedra: Yeah, it was the latter. It was that we identified that there was a shift happening, in retail, in F&B. So where we felt this the most was the quick-serve restaurants where they were changing their traditional lightbox menu boards to LCD screens, and that was a big business for us, lightboxes, menu boards, keeping those menu boards updated.

So at that point, we realized that there was a shift happening and we were going to start losing the lightbox kind of offering that we had we formed a relationship and exclusivity with Phillips Professional Panels, Professional Displays at the time, and we were their exclusive distributor here in the UAE for a number of years and that's where the digital signage business began.

And what does that represent for Blue Rhine now? Is it like a big part of their business or like a sideline?

Nita Odedra: More than half the business now is digital signage or some type of static signage, which incorporates digital signage into it. So we have fully dedicated teams. It's like the business is almost split into two and digital signage is where we're seeing the most growth.

I suspect the two are complimentary still in that if you come across a job that involves something more than hanging a screen on a wall, there are a lot of solutions providers that don't really have the expertise on the engineering side, don't have the man lifts or any of these things to do the more aggressive or complicated work.

Nita Odedra: Absolutely. So that's really our differentiator in the market here is that because the company grew from being a fabricator. So we have four factories. We have facilities for large steel structures, both indoor and outdoor large totems. So we're doing canopies for gas stations as part of our static business, which allows us to be able to do those large unipoles for the out-of-home media agencies, for example, down the highway.

So the ability to manage that whole project from technical drawings on steel structures and, the housing and all that type of stuff, all the way through to fabricating in our facility, installing it in-house, having the digital signage arm of the business, the software, the content, we're able to provide that full end to end solution and that means that when we're doing these installations, especially indoor environments, where we're doing the secondary structure, every millimeter counts when it comes to that perfection of LED screens, for example, and having that beautiful screen housing structure, that's all done by us.

Lord knows we've seen around the world, large format display projects that have been done by companies who probably don't know what they are doing because things fall over or fall on people and everything else.

Nita Odedra: Yeah, we've seen that recently, but, we've got in-house engineers. We've got those project managers in-house. We've got guys doing BIM in-house as well.

So we have that technical capability all the way from the drawings. Then we've got the fabrication facility with skilled workers. We have multiple HSC kinds of offices that are going on-site. Most recently we did quite a complex project, from beginning to end, which was the Dubai Mall Aquarium, which was a long installation. That was six months. Because it's a fully operational mall, we had a very short window at night time to go in to put all the access equipment up and work. we had to take out the existing screen, which was an OLED LG display, and then replace that with the infrared screen that we put in and that took six months and we're very proud of that installation because we had zero HSC violations over six months and our team just did a fantastic job there.

Is that an anomaly or is that kind of the work you do?

Nita Odedra: That's very much the kind of work we do. So it is these large screens, it is custom fabrication. It will be complex sites. So we're doing one at the moment, which is a very large outdoor screen on the corner of a building, which is also still in construction. So this is very typical, especially when we're looking at those large format screens.

Those are jobs that don't come along that often, even in your region. A lot of companies would rely more on the, use a term I use quite a bit, meat and potatoes kind of work where it's conventional flat panel LCDs for menu displays.

Nita Odedra: So here the market is a little bit different because we've got so many projects, new developments, they're trying to do things differently. We’ve got cylinder LCDs, we've got pillars being clad, etc. But yeah, you're right there. Our bread and butter and the fast-moving business that keeps the lights on is the retail business. That is the LED screens, the LCD video walls, and interactive displays in retail environments.

When we get those orders in, they turn around pretty quickly, within a couple of months, the payments are pretty good on those because you're delivering in a shorter time frame, and on the larger projects, that's where, sometimes we can get our money stuck, projects get delayed. An example would be Abu Dhabi Airport, Terminal A, where that project was delayed over a couple of years and we had that stock ready, and then COVID came, the project got delayed, and that became from what should have been two years became five years.

You just have to sit on that stuff.

Nita Odedra: You're sitting on it or you install it and then the airport's still not open. You've got a screen up there that's not ready for any content yet. But it's just the way it is, especially in this region, projects sometimes do get delayed and we just have to be prepared for that when we're resourcing the company and now we're at over 750 people, almost 800 across the region. So it's managing those resources and making sure that the installation or the fabrication that we're aligned internally on manages everything.

So from a distance, I look at the GCC region and I see these mega projects being announced and I always wonder how many of them are actually going to be built and how long does it take?

Nita Odedra: So these are ambitious projects, right? So we're looking at projects in NEOM, like The Line, we've got several projects in and around Medina, and they are very ambitious when you look at them on paper. They are happening, but some of them are being scaled back. So you may have heard Neom The Line that was scaled back from, hundreds of kilometers down to just a couple of kilometers.

But it's still one of the largest building projects in the world, even at that scale-down size, right?

Nita Odedra: Absolutely, and we are seeing that these projects are now coming to life. So things that were announced, what, five years ago, probably like 2018 when they set the 2030 vision for Saudi Arabia specifically. A lot of those projects are now happening, the hotels are opening, the resorts are opening, so we look at places like the Red Sea Development, which has luxury resorts. It's going to be a tourist destination. They're already accepting guests there now. They've got Qadir, which is picking up pace. We've got King Salman Park, which will be the largest urban park in the world. When you're in the city, work is happening and it's happening at a very fast pace.

Who is largely funding these? Are you in a better position to see them actually happen if they're coming through a big fund like PIF in Saudi Arabia?

Nita Odedra: Yeah. So a lot of the work that we're doing and the projects, they are being funded by the government, by the public investment funds.

So those are the ones that are picking up speed, but of course, other private companies are coming up with their developments and they're turning the round very fast. There are out-of-home media agencies that are doing phenomenally well. They're companies like Al Arabiya who are sweeping up these new developments for their network.

Is it very competitive in your region? I'm familiar with three or four companies who do what you guys do, different routes, and everything else. But I suspect because of the money that's going into the region, there's all kinds of other companies in the region and in Europe and even in North America are looking at it and thinking we need to be there.

Nita Odedra: There is competition. There are system integrators, smaller ones that we're having to compete with quite aggressively in the retail space, but where we're different is we've been in this game a lot longer. So perhaps we've lost some clients in retail for a year or two, they've experimented with perhaps other system integrators. Some have been successful, some when it comes to those retail projects, a little bit more complex where, the fabrication element comes back in again, experienced project management that comes back in again, HSC, when these elements are not supported by a competitor, they end up coming back to us and we're able to maintain that retail business.

But absolutely in retail, we have a lot of competition. But there is a lot of work here. There are lots of malls still opening, whether that's the UAE or in Saudi, where there's a huge number of malls opening up, there is business there.

Does it feel at all like a bubble?

Nita Odedra: It feels like a bubble when I look at politics internationally and how we don't have that here and we're a little bit in a little happy bubble here.

So yeah, it does feel like it sometimes. And it's easy to forget that this region is an anomaly. We are a region where there are a lot of ambitious projects with speed happening. There is work. There's a very positive attitude towards these projects that are being developed. There's a very positive attitude towards the hosting of sporting events in the region. People are excited about it. They welcome it. It's something new, right?

So it can feel like a bit of a bubble sometimes when we have so much regional excitement that, perhaps globally, it's not the same landscape.

Yeah, you mentioned shopping malls going up, and I've been to Dubai, it's been a number of years, but I thought even at that time, okay, there's enough shopping malls here now. But they just keep coming.

Nita Odedra: I'm shocked as well. So every time there's a new mall, I was like, surely they're not gonna be busy, and then you go, and they're packed. This is low season right now. So the school holidays started last week and we don't get much tourism in the summer, but the mall was absolutely packed.

It's very much a small culture here. We don't have historical high streets or historical villages. Everything is new. Everything's flashy and people want to go to the mall. That's the only place that they can go to for F&B, for entertainment, picking up their groceries, and doing their usual high street shop.

There's a practical reason behind that too, just that it's, so crazy hot there that malls are air-conditioned. So the dwell time, I gather, is not measured in minutes and hours.

Nita Odedra: Yeah, it is not unusual to be in the mall for six to seven hours. You'd perhaps do two meals there, watch a movie, go shopping, and then leave after doing your grocery shop. So it's high dwell times.

It's incredibly hot here. So I even have friends who go to the mall In the summer, just to get their step count in. So they'll go, grab a coffee, do their step count, pop in, run some errands, whether it's dry cleaning, or whatever it is that they've got to do, but they'll do that step count inside the mall, as opposed to a park, or the town pavements.

Does that make it a better media environment?

Nita Odedra: Absolutely, So for the out-of-home media agencies, they've got a good captive audience there. It's all indoor. So I think it works really well for the media networks and or the out of their media agencies.

We've chatted a few times in the past. I'm always curious about the impact of the wow factor on Projects over there and how important it is

Nita Odedra: culturally, I think we've got a bit of history here with Dubai because it's been established a little bit longer in terms of these, ambitious developments, but they want to be the biggest and the best, whether it's building the tallest building in the world, the Burj Al Arab, the largest mall in the world, maybe the busiest mall, the busiest airport terminals.

They do have this pride in trying to put developments out there that are new, and ambitious. Something that is the largest, and what that means is sometimes it comes with a bit of flash and you've got all bells, all whistles installations for screens. Dubai Mall is an example where I think that's the largest indoor screen in Dubai Mall and you'll have other ones coming up in the next couple of years trying to beat that I'm sure.

Now, as somebody whose role involves strategy. I suspect it's a bit of a delicate dance for you in that you're hearing about these ambitions of being the biggest, the best, and so on and you have to sit there and think, monetarily, that could be great for us, but strategy-wise, I'm not sure that's the right move.

Nita Odedra: Exactly. So we have to be really careful about which projects we take, how many projects we take, and when we take on new partners and new product lines. When we dive first, we're adding more software with, we're providing content now. So we've got to be really careful about what our strengths are and stay true to who we are.

We get asked all the time to do things that are, outside of our scope, but we really have to say no, scale it back, and just stick to our objectives, our strategy as a business, the direction we want to go in, and that's very much customer experiences, passenger experiences. So we're one of the verticals that we're, growing at quite a fast pace is transport.

So airports. There are a number of domestic airport openings in Saudi, we've got new airports opening in Dubai and, across the region. So that's an area that we strategically know that we can take on large projects, we're capable and we're going to see good business.

Airports, I talk about a lot as being, if you want to see the state-of-the-art and digital signage, look at a refurbished or newly built airport because it just covers the waterfront in terms of digital out-of-home, conventional signage, wayfinding, everything.

Nita Odedra: An airport is a perfect example of where you could probably take somebody for a site visit and show them every single type of installation for a digital screen possible and software and integration. Airports are the perfect vertical for us to really penetrate and all our complete offerings can be in an airport because we're taking our experience within malls for travel retail. We're taking our experience from mixed-use developments, and all our experience from all the other verticals can now be applied within transport and airports specifically.

Yeah, I'm curious if you work with the large engineering and architecture companies, like, all the way up to Populous who I think is involved in the Qiddiya project.

Nita Odedra: So we work very often from concept all the way through to delivery, and that would mean the contractors, the architects, the cost consultants, the design consultants, these are all stakeholders that are involved quite early on in the conversations and remain in those conversations almost through to delivery.

What about on the services side? Obviously you're doing the front end, you're, deploying, you're, designing, fabricating everything else. Are you doing ongoing aftercare? And you mentioned content before?

Nita Odedra: Yeah. So services are part of the complete solution, right? So we've got to offer the AMC afterward, and that can be anything from servicing the screens to maintaining them in this region. You've got LEDs outdoors and they need to be maintained, and cleaned of dust. That's very much part of the AMC. There’s remote content management where we're providing content management solutions for retailers and that's for outside of the region as well. So retail operators who are not just in the GCC, but all the way through to Malaysia, Europe, travel retailers who are in Norway.

So managing their content from Dubai, and then, more recently providing the content creation piece as well. So that's where we will have partners. We've got our preferred content partners who are delivering fantastic work globally, and we're transparent with our clients as well that, this is our partner, but we're offering the complete solution under our canopy.

You're managing screens in Norway from Dubai?

Nita Odedra: Yeah, we're managing the content for screens in Norway, all the way through to Malaysia, and Indonesia, I think even in London, so it's becoming global now. So even though we're delivering work within the Middle East region and our direct offices and fabrication facilities, warehouses are all in the GCC, so those are the Gulf countries, Oman, Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi, and UAE. We are also in Egypt. We're delivering into North Africa and the wider Middle East area.

Do you have a preferred list or go to a set of partners on the display hardware and software side, or do you take it project by project?

Nita Odedra: Yeah, that's a great question, actually. So as I spoke about earlier we started this journey with Philips Professional Displays that was for a short period of time when we were starting out. We then realized that distribution wasn't for us. We want to be a system integrator. We were shooting ourselves in the foot there. So that was handed over to another business within our group of companies. So our owner has a trading division. So that was handed over to them and they are now the distributor.

And we fully threw ourselves into being a system integrator where we were able to develop relationships with a number of different vendors and partners, and we remain agnostic. So it's dependent on the project. What is right for that project? And yes, there'll be periods of time where sometimes we're getting great pricing from Samsung and we'll deliver a number of Samsung LCD screens, and then LG. The next day that changes and that's very much price driven if I'm honest Based on the availability of the screens then when it comes to the LED screens, that's far more complex and that is a problem based on the project and the requirements, and that can be very different from project to project.

We have a fantastic Head of Digital, Neeraj Vyas, who's been with us since the beginning, been with us for over 11 years now, and he is in China almost every month going and doing that quality control, really getting into the details of the screen, and he's the one very often who will spec out which, the hardware we're going to use for those big projects.

Do you find that the customers or the specifiers, if they're an engineering firm or an architecture firm, do they know what they need and what they want to use? Or are they saying, yeah, we want to use COB here, or it needs to be this pitch or whatever, or are they relying on you?

Nita Odedra: Yeah. So that does happen. They are informed and there are lots of great resources available for them to have a vague idea of what they want. But just yesterday I was on a call with our head of tech and a design firm where they loosely knew what they wanted and what they needed. But when we were drilling down into the requirements and the structure of these screens where they're going, and is it facing daylight? Is it not? We then realized that there was a support that they needed and some guidance on the specification of the screen.

So there was one specific screen that they mentioned, and we said, actually we have used that screen in an outdoor environment. We probably wouldn't recommend it for X, Y, or Z reasons. They understood the reasons. Because we're also the fabricator and we've got all this experience in indoor outdoor environments in this regio, we know the ventilation we know how to design those structures with ventilation, what type of provisions have to be made so we're able to get in quite early with these guys and educate them guide them on considerations that they may not have made

The heat in your region obviously tough on humans, and I know that any display technology company has to worry about getting that heat out of the enclosure or whatever, but do you really have to think about it there?

Nita Odedra: Yes. We really do have to think about it. There are the manufacturers there who are saying, of course, that it will withstand heat to 50-60 degrees, even beyond some of them, but having done this for over 12 years.

But having installation throughout, the peak summer period for testing. We do have to make provisions for ventilation, for AC, for cooling. These are all provisions that we do have to make for outdoor screens, especially the LCD screens, mainly the outdoor LCD screens here, but for LED screens, of course, we still have to account for ventilation.

Yeah. With them, you have to worry about blowing off all the dust and everything, and the sand that gets in.

Nita Odedra: Exactly. maintaining those, making sure that the sand, making sure the structure as well isn't capturing all that kind of dust floating around. So yeah, even simple things like, when you've got touch screens inside malls and stuff and the IR frame back in the days, there's dust captures in there or sensors. These are all things that we have to consider quite early.

I first got an idea of your company on LinkedIn by seeing a video that I believe was for the Dubai Mall, the project you were talking about before and what struck me is, Oh my God, there's an integrator who actually gets marketing.

Nita Odedra: Funnily, the John who I spoke about earlier, my boss, his background is marketing. So I think his degree was in marketing. So he's very passionate about our marketing. He's very hands-on and I'm getting WhatsApp messages in the night saying, let's try this. Let's do something different, and he's the gentleman probably on the video that you saw, and we're a bunch of passionate people. We've all been in the company for a while. He's been there since the beginning. over 17 years, I've been there for almost eight, or nine years now.

So we were passionate about the business. We've grown with the business. We've seen the business grow and we're so excited about these projects that we're delivering. We're excited about what's happening in the region, not just for us, but we love to talk about other things that are happening in the region as well. So yeah, I think, we're doing the marketing justice and he's great on camera as well.

Yeah, I mentioned that just because I so often see reports about projects and I'm lucky if they even provide decent photos. So to come across videos that explain this is what we did, this is what we use, this is where it is, this is how it works without overwhelming you with Euro disco music or whatever, just the facts, it was almost stunning. Oh my God, somebody got it.

Nita Odedra: Yeah. So he really came up with a decision very early on, probably about six years ago, seven years ago, actually, that everything needs to be video content. He wasn't even happy with just images. He was like people are digesting content in videos and this was like the days, early days of, videos being on Instagram or LinkedIn. So we started churning out a lot more videos, to begin with, which were just the videos of the projects, and then that evolved to us giving kind of explainers, educating the audience and just making them short and snappy.

We're making more data-driven decisions on the type of marketing we're doing, where are we getting the most engagement? What are people enjoying? What are they engaging with and sharing? And it seems to be that the ones where we're explaining in a very short space of time, like you said, within 30 seconds, get straight to the point. “This is a pixel pitch, 1.2, the size of it. What have we delivered? How did we do it?” And just get straight to it. That's what people want to know. They want to see the screen. They want to know how you did it and what did you do? Keep it simple.

Yeah, we were collectively on a panel a couple of months ago now in Munich at the Digital Signage Summit, and it was about doing business in your region and what I asked the group was how easy or hard it is because it is different, right?

You can't just drop your company into this region and expect to start getting the business rolling in.

Nita Odedra: Yeah, we've got 17 years of experience, but still monthly, there are new regulations. There are new challenges, whether that's employing locals. So in Saudi, we've got Saudinization where a set quota has to be local employees. Resourcing regionally as well can be a challenge, just licensing and all that paperwork for us still is a challenge. So I know how daunting it is for system integrators, and vendors trying to enter into this region and there are certain cultural sensitivities that we've got to keep in mind, there are a lot of different cultures working together as well.

So the culture here is very different from European culture and American culture, even more so. There's that consideration to have as well when you're entering into the market. But I would say to anybody that wants to enter into this market, partner up with somebody, to begin with, find the opportunities, find some local partners, get started, have your hand held a bit before you make any decisions, and jump straight into the deep end.

Now, for a company that's from Europe or from North America or elsewhere, looking at going into that region and saying, okay, I agree, let's partner. They're probably going to be intimidated that this partner may result in us losing the larger business because now we have a partner instead of doing this solo.

Nita Odedra: Yeah, I do personally believe that there's enough in the piece of the pie for everybody, especially in this region. But, we look at long-term partnerships. So we're quite selective with who we work with and how we work with them, and we do believe in honest, transparent partnerships. We will make sure that we've got contracts in place to protect them more than we even. So if they have, because we are looking long term, if they've brought a client, they've got a client who is from the US or Europe and they're looking to support them here regionally and they need a partner. We'll ring fence that client. We'll put contracts in place, it's a ring fence for them. It's only them. We won't touch them directly and just make sure everything's covered legally for them and honor that as well, so making sure that even from the top down, you've got that commitment. So we always make sure on all of our partnerships that from right at the top of management, I'm getting them in conversations with those partners and getting that commitment on what we will be delivering on, and also not creating any exclusivity either too early.

Sometimes getting exclusive with a partner straight away and it's not good for them. It's not good for us, to allow them the flexibility to go out to other system integrators. They don't have to work exclusively with us.

And just finally, on the cultural side, I would say the common perception is it's very different over there and challenging to work in and everything else, but in talking with you and speaking with other people who work in the region, they've said, yeah, it's different, but it's perhaps not what you think.

It's not as challenging and things have relaxed, particularly in areas like Saudi quite a bit.

Nita Odedra: I've seen a shift here. So I've been in the Middle East now for almost 10 years, and I'm originally from the UK. I'm just outside of London. I worked in London and across Europe and America in terms of my territories. So I'm familiar with the European market, familiar with the North American market, and the way of working.

There is a different culture and pace here, but the projects are happening at such a speed that things do materialize. They do happen quite quickly. So it's not that much of a culture shock. You've just got to be prepared, the professionalism, should we say, is different. It's there, but it's just different.

All right. Leave me hanging on that one.

Nita Odedra: Timelines, deadlines, all that kind of stuff. Those get pushed back a lot in this region, adhering to timelines. So most of our projects that get delayed, get delayed by the client side, approvals for drawings, client.

One of the biggest challenges we have is site conditions. They'll push for us to have, I don't know, let's just say 300 outdoor interactive kiosks ready. They'll pay a premium just to have them turned around faster because they're not willing to wait nine months. They want them delivered in four months, and then there's no data or power, and we're sitting on 300-plus outdoor kiosks and charging them for the storage, and that is not uncommon.

Interesting. Great to catch up with you. We see each other here and there at trade shows, but we're obviously many hours apart. So it's not a routine thing.

Nita Odedra: Thank you for taking the time out, it's been a great conversation and I look forward to seeing you hopefully at ISE.

Absolutely.

Nita Odedra: Thank you.